EMC profit, revenue soar on storage and VMware

IDG News Service - Surging revenue from storage, security and virtualization brought record financial results at EMC in the fourth quarter, the company reported Tuesday.

EMC's consolidated revenue rose 19% to a record $4.9 billion, while earnings increased 53% to 29 cents per share. The results came one day after EMC's majority-owned subsidiary VMware reported its profit roughly doubled and revenue rose 37% in the same quarter.

The VMware business led in EMC's revenue gains, while the company's RSA security division posted a 28% revenue gain for the quarter. In EMC's core storage business, the midtier product lines, including Clariion, Celerra and Data Domain, saw the greatest sales growth at 23%. The high-end Symmetrix portfolio had sales up 19%.

EMC Chairman and CEO Joe Tucci attributed the strong results to overall trends in IT, including the rapid growth in data storage requirements.

Revenue in the U.S., which represented just over half of the company's business, grew 20% in the quarter. Growth in Europe, the Middle East and Africa was slower at 16%, while the Asia-Pacific and Japan region increased 30%. Latin American revenue rose 34%.

The company's reported profit of 42 cents per share, not counting one-time items, slightly exceeded the 41 cents consensus estimate of analysts polled by Thomson Reuters. The company also beat analysts' revenue estimate of $4.78 billion.

Full-year consolidated revenue for 2010 also reached a record, rising 21% from 2009 to hit $17 billion. Earnings per share for the year were 88 cents.

For 2011, EMC said it expects revenue of $19.6 billion and earnings per share of $1.07.

Stephen Lawson covers mobile, storage and networking technologies for The IDG News Service. Follow Stephen on Twitter at @sdlawsonmedia. Stephen's e-mail address is stephen_lawson@idg.com